Dec 9, 2020
Multilingual portal homepage with good indexed meta
Hi everyone,
I would like to know if i'm in the right way in doing what i'm going to describe.
I've read a lot concerning the subject in search central documentation and through web. But never found the same particular configuration i have.
I deal with a multilingual website. I have 4 websites versions, 1/language. They are all well configured for multilingual seo with hreflang, differents pages per language, canonical urls...
The problem come from a portal homepage. This page is kind of hub who drives people through differents divisions and websites of our company... Here is the link : https://tinyurl.com/y5696hsh
For the moment this page is an unique page. The switch between translations is made through lang parameters in the url : https://tinyurl.com/y5696hsh?lang=fr. And i know it's not the right way. Because with this technique google bot cannot indexed the good title et meta description in SERP. I can see the problem making search, all metas are in english...
I want that for my main domaine name (hub pages), metas & title are in the language of the user (browser...). So i'm going to implement one page per language and set good hreflang parameters, canonical url and text per version. With the default page responding on mydomain.com and others page versions on mydomain.com/home, mydomain.com/start...
Can you confirm me that what i'm going to do will result in a good indexation of metas descriptions/ title... when the user will search for example in Germany for our website, people will have infos in German ?
If you have an example of this, i will appreciate.
Many thanks for your help.
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I took a quick look at your site & at some of our internal tools to double-check. First off, using parameters (like ?lang=fr) is perfectly fine, and these can be indexed like normal pages. The issue I noticed though was that you aren't linking to those parameter URLs, but rather using a HTML form to navigate there using the language/country flags. This means that we're not able to find those URLs through normal crawling, which is probably the primary reason we're not indexing them.
I also noticed that you're additionally using /en/, /fr/, etc directory-level language versions. Off-hand, you seem to have a similar issue there, in that there don't seem to be direct links to those language versions, which makes it harder for us to find them. However, in these cases, you have the URLs mentioned in the option dropdown, which is something we *might* be able to pick up. The hreflang annotations there look ok, the title attributes on the link-elements are a bit confusing (fr_FR vs fr), but we ignore those.
My recommendation would be to make sure that the whole site, with all its versions, can be crawled normally through links between the versions. That would make it easier for us to automatically pick everything up, and to index it appropriately.
As an aside, I don't know if you really need hreflang annotations for all of your pages. While having hreflang annotations for all pages won't cause any problems, they do require a bit of time to maintain & monitor. In particular, if you don't see users landing on the wrong language versions of specific page types, it's possible you don't need it there. For example, if people search for your business name, it's hard to recognize which language version they're looking for, so having hreflang annotations across languages for the homepage often makes sense. However, for many of the more specific pages, I assume users tend to search with words that are clearly in one particular language, so it's easier for us to show the appropriate version in search. In short, while it's possible to place hreflang everywhere, in most cases its usefulness is focused on a smaller part of a site.
Hope this helps!
John
Platinum Product Expert Andrés Tirado 🚨🐼🐧🚨 recommended this
Original Poster Adrien D marked this as an answer
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I took a quick look at your site & at some of our internal tools to double-check. First off, using parameters (like ?lang=fr) is perfectly fine, and these can be indexed like normal pages. The issue I noticed though was that you aren't linking to those parameter URLs, but rather using a HTML form to navigate there using the language/country flags. This means that we're not able to find those URLs through normal crawling, which is probably the primary reason we're not indexing them.
I also noticed that you're additionally using /en/, /fr/, etc directory-level language versions. Off-hand, you seem to have a similar issue there, in that there don't seem to be direct links to those language versions, which makes it harder for us to find them. However, in these cases, you have the URLs mentioned in the option dropdown, which is something we *might* be able to pick up. The hreflang annotations there look ok, the title attributes on the link-elements are a bit confusing (fr_FR vs fr), but we ignore those.
My recommendation would be to make sure that the whole site, with all its versions, can be crawled normally through links between the versions. That would make it easier for us to automatically pick everything up, and to index it appropriately.
As an aside, I don't know if you really need hreflang annotations for all of your pages. While having hreflang annotations for all pages won't cause any problems, they do require a bit of time to maintain & monitor. In particular, if you don't see users landing on the wrong language versions of specific page types, it's possible you don't need it there. For example, if people search for your business name, it's hard to recognize which language version they're looking for, so having hreflang annotations across languages for the homepage often makes sense. However, for many of the more specific pages, I assume users tend to search with words that are clearly in one particular language, so it's easier for us to show the appropriate version in search. In short, while it's possible to place hreflang everywhere, in most cases its usefulness is focused on a smaller part of a site.
Hope this helps!
John
Platinum Product Expert Andrés Tirado 🚨🐼🐧🚨 recommended this
Original Poster Adrien D marked this as an answer